


Almost (But Not Quite) Like Pain

by lonelywalker



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Age Difference, F/M, Pregnancy, Secret Relationship, slight AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-06
Updated: 2015-02-06
Packaged: 2018-03-10 19:14:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3300566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s her friend. He’s a good man. He’s not what her worst fears are telling her he is.</p><p>Spoilers up to 1x12, plus future episode summaries.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Almost (But Not Quite) Like Pain

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Morten Harket's "Lightning".

She finds out on the day Barry Allen wakes up.

It was never the plan – there was never any kind of plan – but they’ve been anything but careful. Nine months since the accident, since Ronnie died, since the lab became both a ghost town and a cemetery. They’ve been fighting for life all that time, grabbing at it and each other, reminding themselves of everything they’d thought was lost. She leaves him with bruises ringing his shoulders, ribs, hips. “You’re not dead,” they say to him, to her too. “You can still feel this. You can still feel me.”

Harrison is jubilant, ecstatic, impatient as they pack up and go out to the airstrip for the first time in months, and she would have loved to see him this way again if it wasn’t for the other thing. The thing that weighs on her mind as Barry wonders about her lost smile. She tells him she’s thinking of Ronnie. And she is. She’s thinking about what he might say, knowing she’s already full with another man’s child.

***

“I need more time,” Harrison says.

They’re in her apartment, tangled up in layers of blankets. She knows just how big and cold his house is, and prefers to have him here, where one space heater makes a room warm and all four walls are actually within sight. He’d made love to her after she’d told him, had kissed her like she’d hoped to be kissed, but there’s doubt and tension in his eyes now. 

Barry’s presence and powers and sunny personality have changed everything for the better in the last week. Harrison is smiling more, talking more, pulling her onto his lap whenever they’re behind a door that closes. But this is on some other, even more indefinable level.

He rolls over, his cheek against her pillow. The only time she ever really sees his eyes is when they’re in bed. “What if he… or she. What if they’re like me?”

She honestly blanks on what he means, what he could possibly mean. “Your paralysis isn’t hereditary,” she says, because of course it’s the medical aspect that occurs to her first. 

Harrison frowns, blinks, looks past her. “I’ve killed a lot of people.”

Sometimes his guilt about the accident is the greatest burden he’ll ever bear. She snuggles closer, wrapping an arm around him, pressing her cheek to his sternum. “You’re brilliant. You’re kind. You care so much about the future. Anyone would hope they’d be like you.”

In the morning, when she wakes, he’s still holding her. He’s quiet and distant, and she knows he’s lying about getting any sleep.

***

He comes with her to the Wests’ little Christmas party, which she knows he’s doing entirely for her. He’s sore, bruised, stitches in his side, lip split open. But he surrenders his pride and better sense, and lets Cisco and Eddie Thawne carry him to the couch (too many stairs). He could’ve died. They all could’ve died. Without the holiday spirit they’d be brooding over the twin shadows of the Reverse Flash and Ronnie Raymond. She has even more on her mind.

Harrison should hate the holiday - has been tetchy about it for the last week - but he’s something like his old self sitting there, graciously accepting Iris’ eggnog, applauding the crowning of the Christmas tree, relating all his best yarns about culture shock at CERN. She’d almost forgotten how charming he can be when he’s inclined. The way he used to laugh in company. The way he used to be happy. 

She absently lifts a hand to smooth down his wild, wayward hair and, realizing, bites her lip before she glances to see anyone else’s reaction.

“We have some news,” Harrison says, smiling at their questioning faces, as relaxed as if it really were good news that could be given simply and easily.

She’s not even sure which fact to start with: _We’re seeing each other, I’m pregnant, I’m having Harrison Wells’ baby._ But she stutters something out, and it’s actually _okay_ afterward. So, so many hugs and jokes, Iris taking photos, Cisco’s eyes as wide as she's ever seen them, and then Harrison sits with his arm tight around her until they finally have to go home.

“I love you,” she tells him, fingertips stroking over his bruised temple, cheek, lips.

He smiles and kisses her. “Merry Christmas,” he says.

***

The first time she feels their baby moving, she’s bound and gagged in a warehouse rigged to explode. Alone and terrified, not knowing what events elsewhere might affect her fate, not knowing whether her friends are alive or dead, Barry Allen isn’t the man she imagines coming to her rescue. Instead she squeezes her eyes tightly shut and thinks of him: her first, original hero. Tall and dark in his crisp white shirt, his suit, the sneakers even the publicist couldn’t wean him off. She would have given anything for _anyone_ to save her, and she’s overjoyed to see both Cisco and Joe. But she’d wanted him.

He’s waiting in the parking lot when they get back, and hugs her tighter than ever while Cisco and Barry exchange high-fives, whooping something about _running on **walls** , yeah man!_ All she wants is to get him out of that awkward chair, to have him hold her in bed, where disabilities and other people don’t matter.

Harrison makes her run scans on herself, although he can understand the data just as well as she can: she’s fine, their baby’s fine. Still, he berates Cisco with a venom she hasn’t heard since the first time the Cold Gun was stolen. She apologizes later: “It wasn’t your fault. He’s just…”

“We get it,” Barry says. “He’s scared.”

 _Scared_. It seems so wrong, from the man who’d endured a smashed spine with a smile, who’d taken her to a party after he was almost beaten to death. But Harrison’s eyes are wet when she curls against him later that night. “I’ll never let anything happen to you,” he whispers. “I love you both so much.”

She knows he’s never going to be her knight in shining armor. But she still believes him.

***

Her apartment is no place for two people to live on a permanent basis, he tells her, let alone two people and a baby. She’s thrilled by the implication (although was there ever a question that they’d be living together?), but less so by the idea of moving into his glass-filled palatial residence. Of course it’s big enough, and lets him move around more easily. But… “Can you imagine trying to childproof this place?”

“Children have thrived in far worse places than this.” He’s poured himself a drink and edged onto one of the daybeds in the massive room he calls his lounge. She likes the fire there, at least, likes to lean against him and watch the dancing of the flames. “But we can shop around, if you like. I just feel…” His phone buzzes.

She waits, certain it’ll be Cisco or Barry, maybe Joe, reporting some crime or other. But Harrison says “Hello?” and sets down his phone a moment later, turning to her as though he wants to say something but isn’t sure what. “Caitlin…”

And then the ceiling shatters.

In less than a second she’s breathless and across the room, her senses filled with broken glass and red lightning. Harrison’s still moving like he shouldn’t, like no one should, pulling her out of the way again as the wall behind them bursts into fragments, shielding her with his body.

“Harry?” A hand pressed protectively to her swollen belly, she doesn’t know which question to ask first. 

“I've never lied to you,” he says. There’s glass littering his hair, sparkling all around them. “I never will. Trust me.”

She could argue a million times that omission and careful phrasing and pretending to need a wheelchair count as lying just as much as anything else. She could ask the question at the forefront of her mind: _who **are** you?_ But she’s had the answer to that all along, during all the years since they first shook hands and she fell in love with his smile. He’s her friend. He’s a good man. He’s not what her worst fears are telling her he is.

“I trust you,” she says.

In the days afterward, she keeps his secrets without understanding why, existing on promises of explanations and the assumption that he gained his powers somewhere in the wreckage of the accident. She never asks him the question he’d have to lie to answer.

(The sex, though, is suddenly _incredible_.)

***

Ronnie comes back to them, wounded and betrayed. They don’t discuss the details, but she knows what he knows: she hadn’t even waited a year before falling into the arms of their boss (or letting him fall into hers).

“You always did like him,” Ronnie says, faking a smile. He doesn’t reach to touch her belly as Harrison constantly does. She’s almost five months gone, so obviously pregnant that she couldn’t hope to pretend otherwise. “I hope he’s good to you.”

She doesn’t blame Cisco for closing the door on him – an act that might have saved them all – but ten, twenty seconds might have been all it took for this to be Ronnie’s child, for there to be a ring on her finger. Harrison doesn’t believe in marriage, or honeymoons, or happy endings. Everything would have been so much simpler with Ronnie, or at least the Ronnie who couldn’t fly or burst into flames.

He and Harrison shake hands, smile, put on a good show that probably involves warnings about treating her well. Perhaps there’s a world where Ronnie survived the accident and she gave in to Harrison regardless. And wouldn’t that be worse?

She knows now, at least, that she wouldn’t exchange him for anyone else in any world.

***

There’s lightning in his eyes the night Barry fights him. He’s not Harrison at all, Joe warns her. He never was. He’s the yellow suit, the red eyes, the man who murdered Barry’s mother fifteen years ago. They don’t even know his name.

She’s spent so many months battling for Barry, praying for him to win out against every fearsome opponent. But now she watches Harrison spit blood and she just wants it all to stop, to be able to freeze time the way Barry sometimes describes it, to pull Harrison out of danger and find some different world they can live in together.

But she doesn’t, she can’t, and everything comes to an end.

They look at her with pity afterward. How could she be so _stupid_? Not just liking him, as they all had done, but loving him, trusting him, being with him night and day. Still, now they know how similar Harrison has always been to Barry, and they’d follow Barry to the ends of the earth, wouldn’t they?

The lab is far too quiet with just the two of them when Barry’s at his day job. She and Cisco try to talk, to laugh. Maybe it would be possible without the baby, _his_ baby, squirming inside her, so very obvious to anyone who so much as glances her way.

“It’s going to be interesting!” Cisco says when she asks whether they’re likely to have a toddler bolting around S.T.A.R. Labs at superspeed. She interprets that as meaning none of them have a clue. Yet when she thinks of their child, it’s not red lightning that comes to mind, but bright blue eyes and an unruly shock of dark hair. 

***

He comes. She knew he would.

Their baby is born in the late afternoon, with Cisco squeezing her hand. It’s such an overwhelming day, filled with friends and family (she’s given her parents the vaguest explanation possible about the father), that she doesn’t have much chance to think before, finally, she drifts off to sleep.

She dreams of him lying beside her in bed, holding her, kissing her, telling her everything will be fine for all three of them. They have a beautiful, wonderful future. He knows it. He’s seen it.

When she opens her eyes, he’s there with her, sitting by her bedside. Even though the mask is pushed back, he could be almost an entirely different person in that yellow suit, without the glasses, without the chair. She expects Barry to come crashing through the window at any second.

“Hi…” she says to him, reaching out so her fingertips touch his. The material of his gloves is rough, well-worn. “I missed you.”

There were no drugs during the delivery – and boy hadn’t _that_ been a bad idea in retrospect – but she feels lightheaded now, as though this too is a dream. He leans in to kiss her and she runs her fingers through his hair, ruffles it, keeping her hands away from the leather and armor. 

“We thought you were dead.” Although had anyone thought that, really? Across time and space, there would always be a Reverse Flash. But then the Reverse Flash wasn’t the man she’d been hoping to see. “You came back.”

“I had to.” A wry smile. “He compels me.” He nods at the crib. “He’s beautiful. Looks just like you.”

“With your eyes.”

“They’re all blue at that age. I hope he’s nothing like me.” His gaze lingers on that tiny bed, and she wants to tell him to hold his son, talk to him, be with him. “What do you think you’ll call him?”

“Harry’s a good name,” she says.

“I thought so, once. But you don’t want to name him after me.”

“No, not you.” She’s thought about it, about nothing else since that last day. “I’ll name him after Harrison Wells.”

He turns back to her. His face seems unmarked in the darkness. He heals, he endures. “Harrison Wells never existed, you know.”

“And you said you’d never lie to me.”

He rises, reaches back for his mask. Does he have anyone speaking in his ear, telling him where to go, wishing him well? “I have to run. He’ll be here soon. The Flash always is.”

She could ask where he’s going as he walks to the crib, wrenches off one glove and, for a moment, dangles a finger inside. “Harry?” she says instead.

He lifts his head.

“Hurry home.”

After all this time, she still trusts him when he tells her he will.


End file.
